The present invention relates to a construction kit comprising elongate structural members designed to be connected to each other by flexible tendons, permitting the construction of a wide variety of two or three dimensional designs and structures. Well-known in the art are construction kits having wooden strut components with the connectors therefor being in the form of multi-apertured wooden discs or spheres with construction restricted to definite angular relationships between adjacent struts. See e.g. the U.S. Pat. To Barlow, U.S. Pat. No. 4,271,628. Further, the number of struts joined by the connectors is limited.
Additionally within the prior art are kits having flexible tubular connectors with pre-formed openings therein. The preformed openings again limit the user as to the number and angular disposition of the interconnected struts. Such tubular connectors are seen in the U.S. Patent to Bombaci, U.S. Pat. No. 3,432,960 and the French patent to Majoux, No. 832,726.
These connectors all require costly forming dies or other costly equipment for their manufacture, resulting in considerable production costs.
Also within the prior art is a construction kit using wooden struts and flexible ring-shaped connectors which the user pierces with a pin, permitting some flexibility as to the number of struts admissible at a given vertex and their relative angles. This method is seen in the U.S. patent to Seubert, U.S. Pat. No. 3,805,441.
My design offers the advantages claimed for Seubert's including reusability of parts and an extremely low cost of production. It is an improvement of Seubert's in at least the following respects: 1. His does not permit widely varying angles in more than one plane without deforming the vertex, and some combinations of angles are not possible at all. All angles are equally acceptable in my invention. 2. Seubert's invention requires the builder to decide in advance the number of struts he or she wants to attach to a given point and to roughly predict their orientation. The structure, in other words, must be designed in whole or in part before construction can begin. My design permits the builder to add on new parts and to alter the angles to suit the evolving model. 3. Collapsing and telescoping models, possible with my design, can not be built with his. 4. The joints in Seubert's invention tend to come undone under stress, whereas the connections in my invention can easily be made as strong as the struts.
In the design patented by Bernstein, U.S. Pat. No. 3,927,489, involving struts joined to connector rings by deformable hooks, structures are deformed from their regular geometrical shapes by the tendency of the connector rings to alter their orientation with respect to the struts. Furthermore, an orientation of the rings proper to a sub-structure may not be acceptable for a larger structure. Thus, for example, Bernstein's design can construct a regular cube, but can not construct two or more linked adjacent cubes.